The Sounds of Silence
by San Antonio Rose
Summary: Cas couldn't heal all of the damage done to Dean by Lucifer's beating at Stull. But even the loss of his hearing is nothing compared to the loss of his brother. (AU from 5.22, background Dean/Lisa)
1. The Sounds of Silence

It didn't register at first. Not for days. His own thoughts were too loud; he couldn't have heard anything else anyway. It wasn't until the silence settled in around him and Lisa looked right at him and said something, repeated it when he frowned in confusion, when he said "I can't hear you" and tapped his right ear once and followed it unconsciously with the sign for _closed _that he realized.

_Ear closed. _Deaf.

Ben stared. Lisa cried. Dean didn't know whether to cry or to curse Cas' healing abilities. That lasted until Cas turned up in a dream and apologized for not being able to do more than lend Dean his own ears until he got to Lisa; the physical damage had healed with everything else, but the nerve damage wasn't something Cas knew how to undo. Dean woke up shaking and crying, and Lisa held him until he cried himself to sleep.

But that was May. Over the summer, Ben and Lisa eagerly learned ASL, and Dean got better at lip-reading and found a job at a garage where his deafness wouldn't put him in danger. That obstacle, as much as Lisa's support, has given Dean the motivation to keep going, not to let the grief over Sam's death cripple him, not to give in to despair. If he can learn to live without his ears, he can—eventually—learn to live without Sam.

_Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain,  
>I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end,<br>I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend,  
>But I always thought that I'd see you again.<em>

Neither is easy, though, and tonight, sitting out here on his tailgate with a bucket of candy, dressed up like his best friend (though most people guess _Columbo_, he can see, and he doesn't bother to correct them) and watching the neighborhood wander by... it hurts. All of it. He's wearing Cas' coat and Sammy's tie and a belt he'd borrowed from Bobby eons ago and forgot to give back, and none of them are here to laugh at him, and he couldn't hear them even if they did. Just like he can't hear the laughter and the funny voices and the childish "Trick-or-treat!" that he knows are echoing all around him.

He's even begun to forget what their voices sounded like, Mom and Dad and Sam and Bobby and Cas and Ellen and Jo and Ash and...

... everybody he's gotten killed.

(Here come more trick-or-treaters who don't know he can't hear. Quit being so maudlin, Dean. _Dude. Maudlin? _Shut up, Sam.

He'll never forget Sammy's laugh.)

Well, he can get Bobby on video chat later, probably. And maybe Cas'll stop by in a dream again. No, he totally did not just pray that. But Sam... Dean can't just drive down to Palo Alto anymore.

_Sleepless hours and dreamless nights and far aways,  
>Ooh, wishing you were here...<em>

He tries to put his old favorites on his mental jukebox to chase the quiet and the memories away. And it works for a while, until the evening winds down and Ben and Lisa come home—Ben dressed as a wendigo, Lisa as Kali, and no, he is _not_going to play Gabriel tonight; that was one thing he never needed to know about their favorite archangel.

But the lights are going out all over the street, and Dean's brain picks the last track of the evening's playlist without his consent:

_Hello, darkness, my old friend,  
>I've come to talk with you again...<em>

Lisa signs for him to come inside, and he does, because he can't face the darkness and the silence alone. She's good for him, his Lisa. But Bobby's not online, and Cas doesn't show up, and all night Dean's dreams are filled with the sounds that Sammy has to live with for all eternity.

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><p>.<p>

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><p>Soundtrack:<br>Fire and Rain - James Taylor  
>Wishing You Were Here - Chicago (with backing vocals by the Beach Boys)<br>The Sounds of Silence - Simon and Garfunkel


	2. Like Silent Raindrops Fell

It's been a year since Carthage. Six months since Detroit. Four months since Sam found himself topside with no clue how he'd gotten there. Two months since the last time he was close enough to Cicero to check on Dean from a safe distance. The Campbells are waiting for him at Mark's place on the far side of Indianapolis, but he just... needs to see how Dean is doing. He's all too aware that the foremost memories on Dean's mind will be their first Thanksgiving without Jo and Ellen and that whacked trip to Heaven where Dean caught up to Sam in the middle of a memory of Thanksgiving dinner with his first crush and her family.

Observing the house in broad daylight is risky, but Sam has good reason to believe both that Lisa will be serving dinner around noon and that enough of the neighbors will be gone that he won't be noticed. To be safe, he parks the Charger a few blocks away and walks to Lisa's house, then finds a comfortable spot from which to watch through the dining room window without being seen from inside. He won't stay long, he promises himself, but he needs to be sure that Dean's okay.

And sure enough, Dean's color is better than it was last time, and he looks better rested and his smiles are coming more easily. Ben and Lisa look happy, too, talking animatedly with their hands and laughing at jokes Sam can't hear.

Sam firmly quashes the part of him that longs to be inside. Dean's better off without him.

He's just about to leave when Ben says something and Dean blinks in confusion, looking hard at Ben for a moment before wiping the backs of his hands and turning to Lisa. Lisa chides Ben and then... _starts signing _for Dean. And Dean inclines his head in comprehension.

How had Sam missed this? He keeps watching as Ben sets down his utensils and signs _Sorry_ before continuing to talk—literally—with his hands. As Dean had requested with the _Hands _sign. Kid must have been talking with his mouth full.

How long has Dean been deaf?

Sam wracks his brain as he walks back to his car, hoping not to have missed the clues when he'd been there before... but no, now that he thinks back, he _had _seen Lisa ask Dean if he was okay by fingerspelling "OK" that first night, when the streetlight went out. Which means...

... _dammit_. Stull.

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><p>Thanksgiving with the Campbells is nice, but it's too much of a reminder of old times at the Roadhouse, and even after twenty years in Hell, the loss of Ellen and Jo is still too fresh for Sam to enjoy himself much. Still, he hangs around the edges of conversations until after dark, when Samuel snags his elbow and tells him to go back to his brother.<p>

Somehow he manages to hit traffic on the way through Indianapolis, so it's nearly 9 by the time he gets back to Cicero. This time he parks in the alley behind Lisa's back fence, planning to try to work out which room Dean sleeps in. But no sooner does he look over the top of the fence than he sees Dean on the back porch, staring at a half-empty bottle of Jack like he doesn't know what to do with it. Sam suddenly remembers Cas confiding to him quietly on the way down from Blue Earth back in April that the encounter with Famine had left Dean too depressed to even get properly drunk.

_How _had Sam missed this? How had he failed to see how badly hurt Dean still was? Had the signs been there all along, just like the signs that Dean was deaf? Could he really be that blind—or no, is it that he's spent too much time on Amon Hen, watching from afar, seeing everything but not hearing the context that would put the lie to his belief that Dean was doing okay?

_"Fool," said I, "you do not know  
>That silence like a cancer grows..."<em>

He's halfway across the yard before he's even aware of what he's doing, but he falters for only a moment. His hands caused this; his hands can make it right.

"Dean?"

No reaction. _Of course not_, says Sam's inner Bobby. _He's __deaf__, you idjit._

Sam's about ten yards away from the porch when Dean becomes aware of him, looking up sluggishly until he realizes who he's seeing. They both freeze for a moment, staring at each other with wide eyes, until Dean reaches up with an S-hand and taps it over his heart twice:

_Sammy?_

Sam doesn't know what sign Ben and Lisa have chosen for Dean's name. But he doesn't think anyone else knows that Sam's sign echoes Dean's sign for him, a D tapped over the heart twice. They'd chosen those signs way back when they were first learning ASL at Pastor Jim's, the summer the youth group planned a mission trip to help a deaf ministry in Colorado and Pastor Jim insisted that signing could be useful on a hunt.

_Hello, Dean._

His eyes bright with tears, Dean pulls a silver knife out of his back pocket. Sam offers his left wrist and fingerspells _Holy H__2__O? _with his right after Dean makes sure the cut doesn't burn. Dean hands him the flask, and Sam drinks as if from a sports bottle so Dean can see the water going into his mouth.

"Sammy?" Dean says again as Sam hands the flask back, his voice a hoarse whisper.

_Yes, Dean_, Sam signs. _Me._

And Sam suddenly has his arms full of silently sobbing older brother. He doesn't want to get blood on Dean's jacket, so he hugs back with only one arm... but he hopes—oh, how he hopes—that Dean can feel and take comfort from the _I love you _sign Sam's pressing into his back.

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><p>.<p>

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><p>AN: Amon Hen, the Hill of Sight, appears in _The Fellowship of the Ring_ "The Breaking of the Fellowship"; Frodo, under the influence of the Ring, has a silent vision of events happening far away—but as Ralph C. Wood points out in _The Gospel According to Tolkien_, sight without hearing leads to skewed perception.


End file.
